6 Tips to Improve your Collaboration in your Huddle Space

Are you prepared for the Workplace 2.0?

At a recent SMART Technologies session in our Ottawa office we spoke about Workplace 2.0. “Huddle spaces” are often mentioned when people talk about Workplace 2.0, new workspaces and collaborative spaces. Huddles take their origins in Lean Manufacturing, which is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS).

For the last 10 years, leading organizations, have been successfully importing concepts and solutions from Lean Manufacturing into service industries such as retail, travel, healthcare, government, and ﬁnancial services. Financial institutions have been at the forefront of the lean movement, with notable success stories coming from banks, insurers, credit card issuers, and asset managers.

When organizations do daily “Huddles”, they use Huddle boards, which are visual performance boards used during daily team meetings to focus discussions. They typically track team and individual performance, monitor customer metrics, show trend charts, and note problem-solving efforts. Organizations now use SMART Board interactive displays to conduct daily huddles more effectively to display Excel worksheets, PowerPoint presentations, websites, etc. all the while interacting with the data and annotating over it. The SMART Board 8070i Interactive Display permits 2 people to annotate at the same time rendering the updates of your Key Performance Indicator even more effective.

6 Tips for your Daily Huddles

There are different approaches to doing Huddles, but here are some tips that can help you:

It’s a stand up meeting, in a collaborative space with no chairs (important).

Have a 15-30 minute time limit.

It’s a meeting for short two-way communication snippets.

It’s a time to review recent performance.

It’s a time to raise issues and surface ideas, not a time for in-depth problem-solving.

It should be led by a senior team member (not a manager).

We are also seeing this approach being used in integrated & converged multimedia newsroom. Editorial teams and reporters will have huddles in the morning to decide what to focus on for the next day’s edition.

It is important to adapt your huddles to what works for your organization. If you would like more information on the integration of collaboration tools in your daily huddles, get your copy of 5 Top Collaboration Tools.